The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell
"The Animal Family" by Randall Jarrell is a children's book that reinterprets an old Scottish folktale about a selkie, a mythical creature that can transform from a seal to a human. The story follows an unnamed hunter, living in a one-room log cabin by the ocean, who is haunted by memories of his deceased parents and yearns for companionship. His life changes when he encounters a mermaid whose singing reminds him of his mother. They develop a deep bond, with the mermaid learning human customs and sharing tales from the sea. Despite their happiness, they struggle with the desire for a child, leading the hunter to adopt a bear cub and later a lynx cub. Ultimately, they find a human baby survivor from a shipwreck, fulfilling their wish for a family. The book, published during the 1960s golden age of children's literature, has received critical acclaim and is noted for its lyrical writing and compelling imagery, making it a modern classic.
The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell
First published: 1965; illustrated
Subjects: Animals, coming-of-age, family, and love and romance
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Fantasy, folktale, and moral tale
Time of work: A pretechnological age
Recommended Ages: 13-15
Locale: A forest next to an ocean
Principal Characters:
The hunter , a skilled and sensitive outdoorsmanThe mermaid , a seal-like creature with silvery blue-green hair who lives with the hunterThe bear cub , an animal adopted as their first attempt to have a child from among the forest creaturesThe lynx , the second animal that they adoptThe boy , an orphan found by the lynx and bear cub
Form and Content
The seven lyrically written chapters of The Animal Family, told by an omniscient narrator, give a simple yet psychologically complex revision of the old Scottish folktale of the seal-like selkie who is tricked into becoming the wife of a human being. In the original story, the selkie sheds its skin on the shore, revealing its lovely human form to a fisherman. He hides the skin and then takes the woman home and marries her. Long after becoming a devoted wife and mother, she discovers her original seal skin and escapes to the ocean, abandoning both husband and children.
Randall Jarrell’s unnamed, orphaned hunter has built and furnished a one-room log cabin near the ocean, its floor covered with seashells and the skins of seals and deer. His sensitive, artistic nature is shown by the “fireplace of pink and gray and green boulders” brought from the shore and by the animals carved on some of the interior logs and the planks of the chairs.
Despite his comfortable and self-sufficient life, the hunter is troubled by dreams of his dead mother and father and by the lack of anyone to share his life. One night, the voice of a mermaid singing on the beach reminds him of his mother’s singing. Seeing him, the mermaid promptly dives under the water, but each night they draw closer together as he attempts to repeat her songs. Finally, they learn each other’s language.
Becoming quite adept at human speech, the mermaid learns how “new” and “different” the land is from the sea and chooses to live with the hunter, sleeping chastely on top of the bearskin comforter. He introduces her to fire; to the curiously human domestic comforts of furniture, dishes, and clothes; and to nursery rhymes and simple children’s games. She tells him sea stories and brings him treasures from the sea, including a necklace of “gold and green and blue stones” and a ship’s figurehead. At the end of their adjustment period, they are still very different, but to each other they seem “exactly alike” and they live happily.
A dream of his parents and their shadows disturbs the hunter. The mermaid interprets this bad dream as his need for a boy to fill that empty place inside him. They cannot have children, however, and are too remote from other humans to “beg or borrow or steal a child.” When the hunter kills an attacking mother bear, he brings home the small cub to raise. Soon tamed, it is at first an attractive substitute child—inquisitive and playful. Yet, in less than a year, he becomes grown and wants only to eat and sleep. When the bear hibernates, the couple loses his company.
In the spring before the bear wakes up, the hunter steals a lynx cub from its mother as a surprise for the mermaid. This “spotted kitten big as a cat” soon becomes tame and proves much more playful, active, and intelligent than the bear. At three years, however, he is grown.
When the lynx discovers a dead woman and her live baby in a wrecked lifeboat, he and the bear herd the boy into the hunter’s house, where he falls asleep. Both animals then lure the hunter and mermaid to the baby. At once, the mermaid recognizes how the boy is a fulfillment of their wish for a child. The hunter buries the dead mother, and together they care for the child.
The book concludes with the boy having become an inseparable part of their family. They teach him the ways of the sea and the land, so the boy is adept in both. After many days and years pass, the hunter, mermaid, and boy play a game, telling variant stories of how he came to live with them.
Critical Context
The Animal Family belongs to the second “golden” age of children’s literature in the 1960’s when editors encouraged successful adult writers to write books for children. In 1961, Michael di Capua, then a young junior editor at Macmillan, invited Jarrell to translate a few fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and to write his own children’s books. Published after two translations of fairy tales and two original books, The Animal Family received rave reviews from such writers as P. L. Travers and John Updike. It was a Newbery Honor Book in 1966 and received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1970. The visual images conjured by the words were so compelling that Maurice Sendak restricted his work to “decorations” for the book, landscape settings with no figures present. The result is an exceptionally harmonious blend of text and illustrations.
A few critics mistakenly connect Jarrell’s story to Hans Christian Andersen’s lachrymose mermaid tale. For most readers and critics, however, The Animal Family is not only Jarrell’s best children’s book but also a modern classic still read in both hard-cover and paperback editions. It is often compared to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943; The Little Prince, 1943), another book for both children and adults. Jarrell’s transformation of a stern folktale into a psychological fairy tale realizes the promise of the book’s prefatory quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke: “Say what you like, but such things do happen—not often, but they do happen.” Jarrell made such things possible.
Bibliography
Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Chappell, Fred. “The Indivisible Presence of Randall Jarrell.” North Carolina Literary Review 1, no. 1 (Summer, 1992): 8-13.
Cyr, Marc D. “Randall Jarrell’s Answerable Style: Revision of Elegy in ’The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 92-106.
Flynn, Richard. Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Hammer, Langdon. “Who Was Randall Jarrell?” Yale Review 79 (1990): 389-405.
Jarrell, Mary. Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Pritchard, William. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. New York: Farrar, 1990.
Quinn, Sr. Bernetta. Randall Jarrell. Boston: Twayne, 1981.